Booking an Appointment
Go to calendar.google.com while logged into your University of Sheffield account, or open Google Calendar from the ‘My Services’ menu on the University webpages while logged in.
- Make sure that you are viewing the shared calendar “SMI - Academic consultation and feedback hours”. You should have access to this calendar when logged into your student account.
If you cannot see the calendar, try the following:
- Visit the calendar manually by clicking this link.
- Search for the ‘SMI - Academic consultation and feedback hours’ in the ‘meet with’ section in Google Calendar.
- Check your University of Sheffield emails to see if you have been invited to the calendar but not yet accepted the invite.
- Check that you are signed into your @sheffield.ac.uk account and not another Google account by clicking on the top right box (the one with your profile picture or initial).
- Email
smi@sheffield.ac.ukfor support. Only do this if you have tried all four steps above.
- Find the consultation and feedback hours for the member of staff that you wish to book an appointment with and left click on the calendar event. Some staff will have separate face-to-face and online/virtual office hours. Others will have blended hours or different arrangements. Ensure that you check the relevant module information on Blackboard and read any description in the Calendar event page carefully.
When you are ready to book an appointment, click “Go to appointment page for this Calendar”.
- This will open the appointments booking page. By default, this page resets the current week, even if you were looking at future weeks in Google Calendar before. You will need to navigate manually to the week you want to book your appointment for.
- Once you have found the correct week click on the available appointment you wish to book. When appointments are 10 or 15 minutes in duration they are usually displayed in a staggered format. The top line of the appointment box aligns to the start time of the appointment.
Click on the appointment slot you wish to book.
- After clicking the appointment slot a confirmation box will appear. Check that the time, date, and other details match the appointment you are trying to book. Your name (the one associated with your Google account) will automatically be added to the end of the booked appointment title.
- Check in the details section or on the module Blackboard page if there is any other information that you need to provide when booking your appointment.
In this example some additional information has been added to the appointment title to request that the appointment is face to face rather than online.
You might also find it useful to add some brief information to the ‘Details’ section of the appointment explaining what you would like to talk about during the appointment. However, keep in mind that anything added here could be seen by other students or by other staff at the university. You can always send additional information in advance via email instead.
- Click ‘save’ once you have made all of the edits you need to make. This will give you a confirmation screen and will add the appointment to your personal calendar, the personal calendar of the person you are booking the appointment with, and to the shared ‘SMI C&F Calendar’.
- Return to your calendar and check that the appointment has saved. You should see two versions — one in your calendar and one in the “SMI - Academic consultation and feedback hours”. Make sure that you do not delete either of these calendar events unless you want to cancel your appointment.
- If you click on the appointment you will see more information:
- If you are requesting a face-to-face meeting, you should see details of the location in the event. This will be different depending on whether the person you are meeting has separate virtual and face to face C&F hours or whether they have blended C&F hours. If you are unsure where this location is, you may want to check in advance or turn up early to the university building to allow ample time to find it.
- If you are requesting a virtual meeting, you will find details of the Google Meets room that will be used below the event title, date and time. You can join the meeting by clicking this link.
Ensure that you use the correct way to join the meeting on the day. If the person you are meeting with has separate virtual and face to face C&F hours, you may need to cancel your appointment and re-book to change how you want to meet. You should check with the person you are meeting if this is the case as it may be possible to change some face to face appointments to be virtual without cancellation.
Cancelling a booked C&F appointment
- If you are not able to make it to a C&F appointment you should always cancel, even if it is very close to the appointment time. It may be that the person you are meeting with is able to meet with another student in the freed up time. If you wish to cancel a booked appointment you should delete it from both your personal calendar and from the “SMI - Academic consultation and feedback hours” calendar.
- When deleting an appointment from your personal calendar, you will be asked to send a cancellation email to all guests. This is generally a good idea in case the person you are meeting knows of someone who may have been unable to book an appointment to whom the freed appointment could be offered immediately.
- You should be able to cancel an appointment in the shared calendar in the same way — however you should be extra careful to make sure it is your appointment you are cancelling and not someone else’s.
When deleting an appointment from the shared SMI C&F calendar, you will be asked to send a cancellation email to all guests with the option to add a cancellation note along with the email notification of a cancellation. You do not have to do this, and if you do, keep in mind that others may be able to see this cancellation note.
